richard@vito:~$ less /usr/share/doc/vdr/README
richard@vito:~$ less /usr/share/doc/vdr/README.Debian.gz
richard@vito:~$ less /usr/share/doc/vdr/INSTALL.gz

Also read, and have open the two VDR man pages:

richard@vito:~$ man vdr
richard@vito:~$ man 5 vdr

Having read all of those, you are now ready to continue:

Try running vdr. The default Video directory is not writable by my user so while we are testing vdr we ask it to use /tmp for video files. You may see a message "please turn off UTF-8 before starting VDR". If so try defining the LANG environment variable:

You may see this error (at least I did) and it means that the channels.conf file is somehow corrupt. You need to update the channels.conf anyway; it must be tailored to your DVB type (ie DVB-C, DVB-S, DVB-T) and if you are using DVB-T the frequencies depend on your local transmitter.
To make a channels.conf use the 'scan' commandline tool, which is part of the dvb-utils package. In my case (DVB-T in the Midlands, UK).
In my case I use:

...well it runs, but if you're using a budget card, it has no way of displaying the picture.

Before moving on, and now that we know that vdr is able to run, lets set it up to run as a service at startup. Open /etc/default/vdr in your editor of choice and add 'export LANG="c"' at the top and set ENABLED=1. Mine looks like this:

richard@vito:~$ sudo nano -w /etc/default/vdr

# /etc/default/vdr
#
# See also /usr/share/doc/README.Debian
#
export LANG="c"
# Change to 1 to enable vdr's init-script
ENABLED=1
# Change this to 1 if you want vdr to be able to shutdown the
# computer
ENABLE_SHUTDOWN=0
# Options that will be passed to vdr's commandline
# for example: OPTIONS="-w 15"
OPTIONS="-w 60"
VIDEO_DIR="/srv/vdr"

If you choose to use a different video directory than the one recommended at installation, you'll have to create it and change its owner to vdr:vdr.

From the 'ps' output you can see that the vdr daemon is being launched from another script called 'runvdr'. Amongst other things, runvdr:

searches for configuration data from /etc/default/vdr.

searches for VDR plugins and related config data from /etc/vdr/plugins.

periodically checks that the vdr daemon is still running and tries to restart it if it has crashed.

tries to load necessary DVB kernel modules.

If there is a problem with VDR running as a service, you will notice repeated entries in the syslog that say "restarting VDR". In this case double check that vdr will run directly from the command line and check that it will run as the "vdr" user by passing the -u vdr commandline option.